
Class 
BooL 









CopightN?. 



CflKORIGHLT DEPOSIT. 



THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 



" nnUAT government of the people y 
hy the people j and for the people, 
shall not perish from the earth. ^^ 



-Lincoln 



THE 
APPEAL OF THE NATION 

FIVE PATRIOTIC ADDRESSES 



BY 

GEORGE A. GORDON 

MINISTER OP THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH 
BOSTON 




THE PILGRIM PRESS 

BOSTON CHICAGO 






Copyright, 1917, bt George A. Gordon 

All rights reserved 



Published May, 1917 






THE PILGRIM PRESS 
BOSTON 

m 16 1317 



©CU4B0859 



PERSONAL WORD 

From the early days of American history 
the Old South Church has been a centre of wise 
and bold patriotic feeling. In the Colonial 
period, with others of its order, this church saw 
clearly the importance of the State as the form 
of political freedom. In proof of this it is perhaps 
enough to name Samuel Sewall, Chief Justice 
of the Supreme Court, the leading layman of 
the Old South Church of his time, whose voice 
against human slavery, and in behalf of uni- 
versal freedom, was one of the first to be raised 
in the Colony. The history of the American 
Revolution cannot be written with Samuel 
Adams left out of the account. Adams was the 
leading layman of the Old South Church of 
his generation. In the Civil War the church 
maintained its place as one of the great centres 
of patriotism and humanity. Perhaps the chief 
significance of this little book, if it has any 
significance at all, is as a witness to the apostolic 
succession of good citizens, as a testimony to 
the fact that what the fathers loved their chil- 
dren and their successors revere and cherish, 
that the fire which the earlier generations kindled 



RSONAL WORD 

on the altar of patriotic devotion still burns in 
full flame, and that no hand will be allowed 
to extinguish it. 

Four of the five Addresses that follow were 
printed separately by the Old South Society, 
for free distribution. Although the editions 
printed were large, they are now practically 
exhausted, and the demand continues. It has 
seemed to those in charge of this matter that 
the collection of these Addresses in a single 
inexpensive volume, with the additiox* of a 
fifth, delivered Good Friday evening, Apr'l 6, 
1917, and here published for the first time, 
might continue to serve thif?' cause of good citizen- 
ship at this critical hour in our history. To 
this appeal I have been unable to withhold 
consent. Although spoken from the pulpit on 
Sunday mornings, with the exception above 
noted, I have called these utterances Addresses 
rather than Sermons, because the text selected 
is used more as a sacred motto for the ideas 
presented and less as governing the entire 
movement of thought. This distinction holds 
less, if at all, in the second and third Addresses 
than in the other three. The descriptive name 
matters little, however, since it raises merely 
a point in professional usage. 

The Sunday morning on which the Address 
on Christian and Citizen was spoken, there was 
presented to the Old South Church the National 
Flag, in these words of pious devotion: 



PERSONAL WORD 

IN HONOR OF THE FIRST REGIMENT OP HEAVY 
ARTILLERY MASSACHUSETTS VOLUNTEERS 1861-1865. IN 
SACRED REMEMBRANCE OF ITS FOUR HUNDRED AND 
EIGHTY-FOUR OFFICERS AND MEN WHO DIED FOR THEIR 
COUNTRY IN THE WAR FOR THE UNION; AND IN GRATI- 
TUDE TO GOD FOR THE BLESSINGS BESTOWED UPON 
THIS NATION THROUGH THE VALOR AND SACRIFICE OF 
SUCH AS THEY. THIS MEMORIAL FLAG IS PRESENTED 
TO THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH. BOSTON. AN HISTORIC 
PROPHET OF AMERICAN FREEDOM. BY A MEMBER OF 
THIS REGIMENT AND OF THIS CHURCH. BOSTON. FEB- 
RUARY. iai7. 

The Sunday on which the Address on Ameri- 
can Loyalty was given, the Flag of the Nation 
was again presented to the church, in the fol- 
lowing words: 

' THIS NATIONAL FLAG IS PRESENTED TO THE OLD 
, SOUTH CHURCH BY SEVERAL OF ITS MEMBERS WHO 
5ERVED THEIR COUNTRY IN THE WAR FOR THE PRES- 
E'^VATION OF THE UNION. IN THE TWENTY-FIFTH. 
THE FORTY-THIRD— OF W tCH THE THE FIFTEENTH 
MINISTER OF THIS CHU^JH. JACOB MERRILL MANNING. 
WAS CHAPLAIN — THE FORTY-FOURTH AND THE FORTY- 
FIFTH REGIMENTS OF MASSACHUSETTS VOLUNTEERS. 
IT IS PRESENTED IN HAPPY MEMORY OF THEIR COM- 
RADES. LIVING AND DEAD; IN EVER DEEPENING LOY- 
ALTY TO THEIR BELOVED COUNTRY; IN THE SURE 
FAITH THAT THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH WILL CONTINUE 
TO BE WHAT IT HAS EVER BEEN. A PROPHET OF THE 
INTEGRITY AND FREEDOM OF THE UNITED STATES 
OF AMERICA. 

The Old South Church would be the last to 
claim preeminence either in devotion to the 
country, or to any other sacred possession of 
our people; it simply desires now as of old to 
let all whom it may concern know where it 
stands, and with what depth of grateful feeling 
it cherishes the august inheritance of the Ameri- 
can Republic. 

George A. Gordon. 

Old South Parsonage, 
Boston 



CONTENTS 



I. American Freedom .... 

11, The Foreign-Born American Citizen 

III. Christian and Citizen . 

IV. American Loyalty .... 
V. The Nation and Humanity . 



PAOB 

3 
17 
33 
53 
71 



AMERICAN FREEDOM 



For freedom did Christ set us free : 
stand fast therefore, and he not en- 
tangled again in a yoke of bondage. 
— Galatians 5:1. 



I 

AMERICAN FREEDOM 

FREEDOM and slavery are in uttermost 
contrast in the lives of human beings. 
The Greeks, whose tongue Paul wrote 
and spoke with power, divided their race into 
two classes: the class of the slave and the class 
of the freeman. Slavery they regarded as the 
lowest degradation; freedom as the highest 
exaltation alike of the outward life and the in- 
ward life. Such has been the feeling of all the 
greater peoples through the whole of human 
history. Slavery has meant physical, intellec- 
tual, and spiritual misery, an afflicted existence, 
an existence robbed of worth and joy; freedom 
has meant physical, intellectual, and spiritual 
worth, power, gladness, and hope. Here all 
Americans, of whatever origin, whether native 
or adopted, stand. 

Americans were born into freedom; they in- 
herited a world of freedom ! Their country is 
the monumental symbol of freedom, first for 
the white man, then for the black man and the 
red man, and finally for all men who come here 
and who are worthy to enter our fellowship and 
our service of freedom, who are ready to uphold 
the institutions and the ideals of the American 



4 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

Republic. The poet Burns, riding over the bat- 
tlefield of Bannockburn, and composing the ode 
which Carlyle said should be sung with the 
throat of the whirlwind, sings not only for all 
the true sons of his native country, in all their 
generations, but also for all true Americans 
everywhere : 

" Wha will be a traitor knave? 
Wha can fill a coward's grave? 
Wha sae base as be a slave? — 
Let him turn, and flee! " 

The sovereign gift of Jesus to the world was 
freedom, — freedom for the spirit that should 
eventually cover the earth with its own forms 
and institutions. And Paul, the greatest dis- 
ciple of Jesus here, as elsewhere, seized his 
Master's religion at the heart, and in the text, 
translated accurately in Standard Bible, set 
before the world this double gift of Christian 
freedom: " For freedom did Christ set us free." 
Here are the two great aspects of freedom: the 
interior freedom of the spirit and the gradual, 
progressive freedom both in rehgion and in 
political life. These are the two aspects of 
Christian freedom that I am to discuss with 
you this morning. 

I. Christian freedom begins in the mind ; it 
is interior, it is spiritual. It is freedom from 
the domination of wrong ideas, false notions, 



AMERICAN FREEDOM 5 

base superstitions, evil purposes, brutal pas- 
sions; it is emancipation from a world in the 
mind that is false, wrong, wretched. Accord- 
ing to Christianity there can be no freedom that 
does not begin in the mind; and this interior 
freedom takes two great directions: it concerns 
the being and the character of God, his disposi- 
tion toward mankind, his government of the 
world. Think of the notions, false, base, horri- 
ble, that have for ages darkened the face of the 
Most High and made men cringe in his presence 
and try to bribe him into doing right, to propi- 
tiate him into good- will toward his own children ! 
Christianity is, first of all, an emancipation 
from this vast and wretched world of false and 
degrading notions that have blotted out the be- 
nignity of the Supreme Being from the sphere 
of human vision. 

This emancipation concerns not God only 
but also man. An equal number of false, mis- 
taken, debasing notions have grown up in regard 
to human life; this tyranny of false and debas- 
ing ideas and views holds men in wrong-doing, 
drives them into courses of shame, and will not 
let them escape. Christianity makes men free 
in their ideas about themselves, their kind, 
their constitution, the good for which they 
were made, and enables them to see what is 
essential good. Inward freedom, — that is the 
first word in Christianity, freedom of the mind. 
Jesus spoke no greater words in all his minis- 



6 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

try than these: '' Ye shall know the truth and 
the truth shall make you free." True ideas on 
any subject, sincerely entertained, make a true 
mind; a true and a truth-loving mind is the 
free mind, and it alone is free. 

Jesus was persecuted by the State and finally 
he was put to death by the State; but he founded 
a kingdom of truth in freedom and a kingdom 
of freedom in truth. He had perfect confidence 
in the truth in the hands of freedom, and of 
freedom as the child of truth. As I have said, 
his greatest apostle, free-born, a citizen of the 
Roman Empire as he was, perhaps because he 
was free-born, seized upon the great central 
gift and promise of his Master to mankind of 
immediate interior freedom and of ultimate 
external freedom. That double freedom was 
Paul's gospel to the Empire. There is an epic 
in the life of this monumental man who had so 
long and in vain sought freedom from a world 
of evil superstitions and false notions about 
God and about himself. The great emancipa- 
tion came to him when he became a disciple of 
Jesus; then he stepped forth as a man made 
free within and made for freedom in a free 
world. 

In this apostolic succession we must place 
the Phrygian slave, Epictetus, who loved free- 
dom with a mighty love and who asked this 
great question: " Who made you a slave, Nero 
or thyself? " Freedom began with him in the 



AMERICAN FREEDOM 7 

mind, in the soul, and this is the story behind 
the achievement of real freedom everywhere. 

The Pilgrims, our prophets of freedom, began 
here. Freedom was first of all a mental passion 
with them, cherished in old England, cherished 
in Holland, cherished in the wilderness of New 
England; more and more they sought to be 
free within. We think of the mistakes, the 
blunders, the inconsistencies of the Pilgrims 
and the Puritans; we dwell on these altogether 
unmagnanimously and too much. Here is their 
central bequest which made them great and 
which makes them greater as the generations 
run. They began with freedom in their souls; 
that was their passion; more and more it came 
to them; more and more it is coming to the 
world, and the Pilgrims especially are among 
the prophets of this greatest thing in human 
history, — the free mind in the truth, the mind 
made free by the truth. 

II. Turn now to the other aspect of Chris- 
tian freedom. While Christian freedom begins 
in the mind it does not end there. It is bound 
to flow outward in its true ideas, and more 
and more it seeks forms and institutions accor- 
dant with its own character. In the life of 
each tree there resides a plan, and that plan 
conforms to itself the tree in which the life is 
to dwell; oak, ash, pine, maple, elm, each be- 
comes the form, lifted into existence, grown 



8 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

into existence by the impulse of the interior 
building life. In the same way the free mind 
seeks to utter itself in forms and in institutions 
accordant with its own character. Here we 
touch the deepest struggle in all human his- 
tory, — the conflict between the true mind, 
the mind made true by true ideas, seeking to 
express itself in institutions correspondent with 
itself, and the darkened mind, the mind in 
bondage, calling upon compulsion and force to 
maintain it in the world. There is the central 
conflict in the history of the world: the mind 
made free by true ideas, seeking to express 
itself in institutions and forms accordant with 
its own character, and the mind under the 
domination of false ideas, in part or in whole, 
employing force to maintain itself supreme 
against freedom and against truth; there, I 
repeat, is the central conflict and the glory of 
human history. 

More and more for the last one hundred and 
fifty years Providence has been throwing into 
the hands of the people, among growing democ- 
racies, the cause of freedom and the cause of 
truth against autocracy, against absolutism, 
against those whose false notions of their maj- 
esty are supported by compulsion. The first 
great movement was the American Revolution. 
This was seconded by the lurid splendor and 
magnificence of the French Revolution; there 
modern democracy was born: there the people 



AMERICAN FREEDOM 9 

began to live in true ideas and in freedom; 
there and then they began to build the free 
commonwealth. 

I beg you to note this great development of 
democracy employed, as it would seem, and as 
I believe, by Providence to create freedom under 
true ideas and with freedom to create institu- 
tions for the benefit — not of certain classes but 
of all mankind. Modern France is a democracy; 
modern Britain is a democracy; the United 
States of America is a democracy ! We speak 
of the blunders of democracies, and it is well 
that we do; we call attention to their mistakes, 
follies, extravagancies, and that is well. But 
fasten your eye upon the central thing, — men 
under the domination, on the whole, of true 
conceptions and thereby made freemen; men 
seeking to express this truth and this freedom 
in institutions created for the good of the whole 
body politic. 

1. Religious Freedom. Here the State touches 
two great interests of the individual man, his re- 
ligious life and his poHtical Hfe. We in America 
declare the State shall not say what we shall 
believe or what we shall worship, or how we 
shall worship what we deem all-worthy. The 
State must leave us to decide what we regard 
as true, what we regard as worthy of worship; 
it must leave us free to adopt what we regard 
as the best method of worship. And here again 
we are close to the Pilgrims as prophets of 



10 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

freedom; this is our inheritance from them, this 
distinction between State and Church. The 
authority of the State stops at the door of the 
sanctuary, and a man's creed is of his own 
thinking; a man's worship is to the being in 
whom he beheves, and the mode of his worship 
is according to his convenience and preference. 

No man can estimate what this inheritance 
is yet to do for the world. We are only begin- 
ning to see what religious freedom means. 
When men are free to believe in what they 
regard as the truth, free to worship what they 
hold to be the Eternal Excellence, free in all 
their methods of worship, that will mean a 
new world of sincerity, of insight, of character, 
of power in religion. 

2. Political Freedom. The second point at 
which the State touches freedom concerns the 
individual citizen. This country was founded 
to give reasonable and just opportunity to 
individual citizens, for the expression of what- 
ever gifts the Almighty had implanted in them, 
— industrial, intellectual, and spiritual. The 
American State is the guardian, the authorita- 
tive guardian of the utmost ordered opportu- 
nity for all men, that they may work out the 
gifts that are in them. The American State is 
not a nurse, it is not a hospital, it is not a syn- 
dicate of capitalists, it is not a union of laborers, 
it is not a paternalism of any kind; it is a 
majestic umpire in the free development of 



AMERICAN FREEDOM 11 

all American talent; it is the great guarantor 
of fair play for all individuals; and, in the 
third place, it is the benevolent friend of the 
defeated and the unfortunate. 

This is the American conception of the State, 
the conception of the founders, and of the second 
founders; of those who fought that this Re- 
public might come into being and of those who 
fought that it might continue in being. I re- 
peat that the American State is not a nurse, 
it is not a hospital, it is not a syndicate of 
money-changers, it is not a union of laborers, 
it is not a paternalism of any kind: it is an 
umpire in the free development of manifold 
power, it is a guarantor of fair play in the 
realization of the universal opportunity! 

This system is not without defects. It has 
this immortal merit, however; it has bred a 
race fit to found, fit to maintain, fit to defend, 
fit to perpetuate the institutions of free men! 
To-day is a solemn day in the life of this na- 
tion. We are on the verge of war, and our 
population is made up largely of the kindred of 
those who are fighting one another in the con- 
tinent of Europe: Scot, English, Irish, Italian, 
French, Belgian on the one side ; and of the 
nations fighting on the other side, all but one 
are generously represented in the American 
Republic. I would be the last to speak a bitter 
word or a word to hurt the sensibihties of any 
man whose blood is derived from either of the 



12 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

Central Powers. But we have on our hands a 
problem, and our question is, how shall we face 
it as a united America? The answer is, we must 
face it as our forefathers faced the Revolution. 

3. The Lesson of the Founders. Here is the 
great, impressive lesson for the composite 
America of to-day. Whom did the Colonists 
fight? Their kindred, their fathers, their 
brothers, those who were bone of their bone 
and flesh of their flesh. It was Englishman 
against Englishman, Scot against Scot, and 
Irishman against Irishman. It was a war 
between kindred and between kinsmen who 
twenty years before had been profound and 
happy friends ! Kinsmen, with the same lan- 
guage, with the same religion, with the same 
literature, with the same traditions of freedom 
and power and manhood, went forth to meet 
each other in battle. There is nothing like so 
tragic a situation in the America of to-day as 
we confront the possibilities of the future as 
there was when the Tea Party took place at 
the hands of those who gathered in the Old 
South Meetinghouse; or when Washington took 
command of the Continental Army under the 
old tree in Cambridge. What was their argu- 
ment, conclusion, motive? It was that every 
tie must be like tow in the fire when it comes 
to the question of the existence of freedom 
among men born for freedom ! 

I commend this example to my fellow adopted 



AMERICAN FREEDOM 13 

citizens of other blood than my own, and I know 
if the case were reversed I should take the lesson 
to myself. What did I mean when I took the 
oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the 
United States and foreswore specially and spe- 
cifically all allegiance to the Queen of Great 
Britain? Preparation for any emergency and 
readiness to count freedom, American freedom, 
first, last, and all the time above every other 
interest. 

One lesson more from the Revolution. The 
revolutionists made a distinction clear and deep 
between the government of Great Britain and 
the people, between King George III and his 
lackeys and bhnd servants and tyrants, and the 
whole people. They knew that Chatham was 
with them, that the greatest political genius of 
the English race was with them, — Edmund 
Burke; they knew or might have known that 
the poet Burns was with them, who after the 
war wrote a great *' Ode to Washington," who 
after the war sacrificed all possibility of a pen- 
sion from the Government by writing " A 
Dream " to George III, which I beg you to read. 
Let our Teutonic citizens, who are among the 
most substantial and the ablest and the worthiest 
of the adopted sons of America, — let them 
draw the distinction which your fathers drew in 
the day of their distress; let them draw the dis- 
tinction between the Teutonic peoples and the 
Teutonic government. And remember that if 



14 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

he were free to speak, the true Teuton would 
say that no nation has a right to limit the just 
freedom of the United States; subject it to 
indignity; to murder its women and children 
on the high seas, or to confine its industry and 
influence within its own bounds. 

We are one to-day, one in our belief in free 
institutions, one in our sense of obligation to 
the American Republic, and all ties even of 
the most sacred character must be, as I have 
said, like tow in the fire when it comes to the 
question whether America shall be first or the 
country of our descent or our birth. 

The President of the United States has been 
patient, patient to the utmost limit, so patient 
that the world has been in danger of misunder- 
standing him. Let us thank God to-day for 
his patience, for his clearness, for his solemn 
decision, and for his hope that war may yet 
be averted. Let us be ready, with our faith, 
our prayer, our manhood, and all our resources 
to stand behind the Government that guards 
the heritage of the American people. 



THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN 
CITIZEN 



And the chief captain answered, 
With a great sum obtained I this 
citizenship. 

— Acts 22 : 28. 



II 

THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN 
CITIZEN 

The Republic of the United States is in fact 
a nation of immigrants, a nation of ahens. All 
have made the great migration, all have come 
hither from other parts of the earth. The only 
difference among Americans is that some came 
earlier while others came much later, indeed as 
it were yesterday, to these shores. The only 
aboriginal American is the Indian. This his- 
toric fact should be forever born in mind. We 
came hither first or last, across the ocean, and 
from the ends of the earth. 

There is however a ground of distinction 
among Americans; they are rightly divided 
into native citizens and citizens foreign born. 
The native citizen has grown into the being of 
the society that his alien ancestors helped to 
form. He has in his blood an American inheri- 
tance; his instincts have been fed with native 
food; he is alive to nothing else as he is to the 
American Republic. We foreign-born Ameri- 
cans acknowledge his distinction, we rejoice 
in his happiness, we count ourselves fortunate 
to stand with him in the great communion of 
free citizens. We ask him, in his turn, to read 



18 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

in the story of our migration the struggle of 
his ancestors; we remind him of what we left 
behind, what we brought with us, and at 
what cost we gained our American citizenship. 

In the words that I have chosen as my text 
we have a foreign-born Roman citizen. Ex- 
actly where he was born we do not know; we 
do know that he was born outside Roman citi- 
zenship. He was, therefore, an adopted citizen 
of the Roman Empire and to this he refers in the 
words that I have quoted, " With a great sum 
obtained I this citizenship." 

There are three implications in these words: 
the cost of citizenship to this man; the privilege 
of citizenship to him; his duty as a Roman citi- 
zen. These three points will be a convenient 
guide to us in our discussion of the subject of the 
morning, The Foreign-born American Citizen. 

1. First of all, then, there is the cost to this 
man of citizenship in the Roman Empire. He 
obtained it with a great sum; to get it made him 
poor. 

There are few among native-born American 
citizens who understand the sacrifice made by 
the foreign-born citizens of the heritage of child- 
hood and boyhood in the wonder-world of early 
life. There is the bereavement of the early mys- 
tic, unfathomable touch of nature that comes 
to one only through one's native land. Never 
again to see the sun rise and set over the dear old 
hills, with the hero's mantle Hke the bloom of 



THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 19 

the heather resting upon them, and the shadow 
of an immemorial race, is truly a great bereave- 
ment. Never again to see the green pastures, 
with the flocks quietly feeding in them, under 
the shade of the plot of trees here and there 
mercifully provided by the humanity of previous 
generations, nor to hear the music of the river 
that has sung into being and out of being forty 
generations of human lives; never again to see 
the fields covered with corn, nor to hear the 
reaper's song among the yellow corn; never 
again to see the light that welcomed you when 
you were born, that smiled on you when you 
were baptized, that went with you to school, 
that watched your play, that constituted the 
beautiful, the glorious environment of your 
early days; never again to hear the song of 
the native birds, the skylark in the morning, the 
mavis at nightfall, and the wild whistle of the 
blackbird under the heat of noon from his 
thorny den, — all this is simply an inexpressible 
bereavement. Nature is inwoven with the 
soul in its earliest years, its beauty, its wild- 
ness, its soul becomes part of the soul of every 
deep-hearted human being, and never again can 
nature be seen as she was seen through the won- 
der of life's morning. 

It is this spell of nature over the young soul 
that gives its exquisite pathos to Hood's world- 
familiar melody: 



20 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

" I remember, I remember, 
The house where I was born. 
The little window where the sun 
Came peeping in at morn; 
He never came a wink too soon, 
Nor brought too long a day, 
But now, I often wish the night 
Had borne my breath away! 



" I remember, I remember. 
The fir trees dark and high; 
I used to think their slender tops 
Were close against the sky: 
It was a childish ignorance. 
But now 'tis little joy 
To know I'm farther off from heav'n 
Than when I was a boy." 

There it is, the mystic, divine influence of na- 
ture through the atmosphere of the country of 
one's birth; every immigrant to this country 
makes that great surrender. 

There is, too, the early humanity. You go 
down^town, you who are native-born American 
citizens, and every day you meet those whom 
you have known from birth, your earliest play- 
mates and schoolmates, and those who went 
to college with you, who entered business with 
you, who fought side by side with you through 
the great war, who loved what you loved in 
early life, revered what you revered, laughed 
at what you laughed at and felt as you felt 



THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 21 

over the glory and the tenderness of existence. 
You do not know what they have left behind 
them who never see a face that they knew in 
childhood, who will never meet again, till time 
is no more, a schoolmate or an early companion, 
who will never gather again in the old home 
with father and mother and brothers and 
sisters; only the most favored have had a fugi- 
tive glance, like looking at a telegraph pole 
from an express train, of those dear, early 
faces. There is a whole world of bereavement 
of early, tender, beautiful humanity on the part 
of all who come here. And this, again you hear 
in those two verses in *' Auld Lang Syne " : 

" We twa hae run about the braes, 
And pu'd the gowans fine, 
But we've wander'd monie a weary foot 
Sin' auld lang syne. 

" We twa hae paidl'd in the burn 
From morning sun till dine, 
But seas between us braid hae roar'd 
Sin' auld lang syne." 

There is one other surrender : there is the suf- 
fering of adjustment in a new country. The 
first year I spent in Boston, from July, 1871, to 
considerably more than July, 1872, I conceived 
my condition to be as near that of the spirits in 
hell as anything I could well imagine! To be in 
a city where nobody knew you, where you knew 
nobody, where so many wanted to take advan- 



22 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

tage of the '' greenhorn," to laugh at him if he 
ever grew for a moment a bit sentimental, was 
not exactly heaven. Many and many a time I 
went down to the wharf to see the ships with 
their white sails, written all over with invisible 
tidings from the far, sunny islands left behind, 
and if I had not been restrained by shame and 
pride I should have gone home. That is the ex- 
perience of Scandinavian, English, Scotch, Irish, 
Teuton, Slav, Armenian, Syrian and Latin; the 
great bereavement of nature and of early hu- 
manity is deepened by the sorrow of readjust- 
ment in a foreign land. '' With a great sum 
obtained we this citizenship "; few understand 
it, few indeed. Foreign-born American citizen- 
ship is preceded by a vast sacrifice, and you never 
can understand that sort of citizenship till you 
take account of this really profound experience. 

2. The next thing in the experience of the 
chief captain was his privilege as a Roman citi- 
zen. His station and bearing and power told of 
that privilege. He was a military tribune in the 
legion stationed in Jerusalem; he had risen to 
important command and power impossible for 
him, inaccessible to him if he had not obtained 
citizenship. 

America has been called the land of oppor- 
tunity. Look at this fact in three directions 
only, since time will not allow more. The com- 
mon workman may become, by intelligence, by 
diligence and by fidelity, the master workman. 



THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 23 

Cast your eyes over the land to-day and assemble 
the master workmen and you will find that the 
vast majority of them have risen from the posi- 
tion of ordinary workmen to the chief places in 
their trade and calling. Such a chance for ascen- 
sion in a broad way for all competent men, in the 
Old World, is a simple impossibility. The chance 
does not exist there. Men rise there by talent 
and by luck, by talent and by favoritism. But 
here in a broad and magnificent manner they rise 
by talent and industry, fidelity and force; here 
as nowhere else they have a chance to work out 
what is in them. 

Consider this in the things of the intellect. 
The Old World calls us an uneducated race. It 
is true that we have not many great scholars; 
the reason is that we are engaged with immediate 
pressing problems; we apply intelligence to liv- 
ing issues which in other lands is applied to the 
Genitive and the Accusative and the Dative 
cases of the Latin and Greek languages. When 
we look backward and consider the provision 
made for the intellect of the nation during the 
last fifty years, we claim that there is no parallel 
to it in any country on which the sun shines. 
More money has gone to found colleges and 
schools and universities for men and for women, 
open to all talent from ocean to ocean and from 
the Canadian border to the Gulf, than was ever 
dedicated to education in the same length of time 
in the history of mankind. Not only is there 



24 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

provision for the regulars but also for the irregu- 
lars; all sorts of evening schools flourish in our 
cities where the first teachers of the community 
are available for talented and aspiring youth of 
slender means. Men are practicing medicine and 
law; they are in the ministry and in other pro- 
fessions, usually called learned, who never saw 
the inside of a college or a university, who have 
obtained an education in what is called an irregu- 
lar way, from and by the very men who are 
teaching in these regular academic institutions. 

Let me remind you of the abundant hospital- 
ity, the wonderful generosity of the American 
people toward aspiring youth. Talent which 
would be ignored in Great Britain, promise 
which would be sneered at in every continental 
country in Europe, is here discovered and en- 
couraged to develop into power. This is a phe- 
nomenon of which we must never lose sight, the 
chance here in the United States for a man to be 
intellectually all that it is possible for him to be. 
The best teachers may often be seen here wield- 
ing the educational power of history and the arts 
to train the youth to whom college is an impossi- 
bility, for service requiring educated powers, in 
his day and generation. 

There is to be noted the opportunity in the 
way of character and moral influence that comes 
to citizens of the United States. What does that 
mean? The chance to change and improve the 
law of the land, the chance for a man to change 



THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 25 

and improve the government of the United 
States, the chance to modify in the hne of hu- 
manity the social feeUng of the United States. 
And freedom is here the condition of all; it is the 
breath of life; every man who complains that 
things are not what they should be has a chance 
by his vote to remedy the abuse and to take an- 
other step toward the ideal. 

Here again there is something new, measur- 
ing it against the whole people. We are dupes 
and fools when we allow ourselves to be ruled by 
groups in this country; we are free men, with the 
power in our hands. If we have moral ideals of 
our own, and moral character, we can so use 
them as to hft the character of the land in which 
we live. 

3. Finally, there was the duty of the tribune 
as a Roman citizen. Paul was about to be bound 
and tortured, without trial, when he appealed 
to the chief captain, "Is it lawful for you to 
scourge a man that is a Roman and uncon- 
demned? " This startled the man. '' Tell me, 
art thou a Roman? Good heavens, this will 
never do! I am pledged to do my duty! Get 
off those shackles and set the man free and 
guard his life! " There was the man's sense of 
his duty. 

What is the duty of foreign-born American 
citizens? First to learn the EngHsh language 
and to prefer it to all other tongues on the face 
of the earth. That tongue comes in the splendor 



26 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

of a June day, it breaks over life like a June sun- 
rise, with an atmosphere, tone, beauty, and 
power which for Americans must ever be un- 
approachable. Let no American citizen hug his 
foreign tongue, go into the closet with it and 
shut out the light of the great English language 
which carries all our ideals as Americans! The 
very vessel of the Lord it is, in which American 
freedom is carried, the language of Shakespeare 
and Milton, the incomparable free man; the 
language of Bacon and Burke and Washington 
and Hamilton and Webster and Lincoln. This 
tongue consecrates the immigrant who would be 
a citizen; he never can be a citizen of the United 
States without that, never. This is the tongue 
that carries in a unique translation the literature 
of Israel; the Bible is the maker of free peoples. 

Next, we foreign-born American citizens must 
read the story of the Revolution into our blood. 
What is the significance of the Revolution for 
the foreign-born American citizen? These men 
were Englishmen or the sons of Englishmen; 
they loved the British Isles better than any por- 
tion of the earth's surface, except their own 
Colonies; they loved them with an inexpressible 
love. Yet when it came to a question of prin- 
ciple they stood out and said, " We must be 
free; the Colonies, or the United States, first ! " 
You recall Daniel Webster's splendid eloquence 
here: 

" On this question of principle, while actual 



THE FOREIGN-BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 27 

suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag 
against a power to which, for purposes of foreign 
conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of 
her glory is not to be compared, — a power which 
has dotted over the surface of the whole globe 
with her possessions and military posts, whose 
morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keep- 
ing company with the hours, circles the earth 
with one continuous and unbroken strain of the 
martial airs of England." 

Against that power to which they were as 
nothing, against that lovely land of their origin 
they stood out when it was a question of their 
own independence and their own manhood. 

That applies to every foreign-born American 
citizen today, — Saxon, Celt, Scandinavian, 
Teuton, Slav, Latin, Syrian, bond and free. 
Learn the lesson of the Revolution. This country 
will have no hands upon it, from any origin, any- 
where outside of itself. Learn the lesson of the 
Civil War; the nation that set to work to keep its 
integrity as a political whole, to keep its integrity 
as a human whole, to fight, as it had done a 
foreign dominion, an evil genius inside its own 
border. There again is a vast lesson to all of us 
who are foreign born. Once again we should 
store in memory and ponder in clearest con- 
science and intelligence the great ideas, the great 
political ideas of America as they are exhibited 
in Washington, in Hamilton the Nationahst and 
in Jefferson the State Rights' patriot; and again 



28 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

in Webster and Calhoun, in Lincoln and the 
Confederate, and as they issued at last in a true 
conception of state freedom in a sisterhood of 
states that constitutes a great nation. These 
things should be part of the common store of 
knowledge of the adopted citizen. They are the 
great forces that have moved this country from 
its earliest beginning, and that have lifted it into 
power and renown. 

America must be first; cherish your love for 
the old country, your tenderness; — a man does 
not need to hate his mother because he loves his 
wife, but it is his duty to stand by his wife even 
against his mother. What kind of a country 
should we have if every citizen, when trouble 
comes, should prefer in loyalty the land of his 
birth ! What a confused mob of a country we 
should have ! Duty overrides origin, tradition, 
sentiment. Here and here alone is our supreme 
and inviolable obligation. 

I often think that this great country of ours is 
ultimately to be the deepest-hearted and the 
brightest-minded nation of the world. Hither 
come, with sore hearts, burdened humanity and 
quickened intelligence, the elect ; yes, the elect 
from all nations. You look at them when they 
land and you laugh. If you had been in Quebec 
when I landed perhaps you would not have 
wanted me as your minister ! The elect from all 
nations, parts of a splendid orchestra, — violin, 
flute, cornet, drum, trumpet, and a score of other 



THE FOREION'BORN AMERICAN CITIZEN 29 

instruments, all pouring forth their genius to 
make the great, swelling, soul-stirring symphony 
of this mighty nation. Thus from Scandinavia, 
Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Armenia, 
Greece; from England, Ireland and Scotland 
they come; — all are here with great souls to 
make a new and greater America. Out of this 
composite land, this Pentecostal nation — some- 
times it seems to me minus the Holy Ghost — 
this nation gathered from every people under 
heaven, rags and tatters and dirt and all, I 
beUeve that the Eternal Spirit will evolve and 
establish the most gifted, the most far-shining 
and the mightiest people in the world. God 
grant that our dream may come true ! 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 



Render therefore unto Caesar the 
things that are Caesar^s, and unto 
God the things that are God's. 

— Matt. 22 :21. 



Ill 

CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 

Poetry and philosophy seemed to Plato to 
stand in irreconcileable opposition. There was 
a quarrel of long standing between them, and 
there seemed to be slight hope that this differ- 
ence should ever be done away. The philosopher 
who is more of a poet than any other in the 
whole historic succession of great thinkers thus 
throws into technical and artificial contrast the 
two highest forms of intellectual power, blended 
as they are in the completest way, in his own 
writings. Plato himself is the refutation of 
his own contention; poetry creates artistic 
forms for the same ultimate insight for which 
philosophy provides definitions and arguments. 

There is current an opinion that the state 
and religion, the duty of a citizen and the obh- 
gation of a Christian stand to each other as pro- 
fane and sacred, as this world and the other, as 
the Kingdom of man and the Kingdom of God. 
It is indeed plain that the state may become 
incompatible with true religion, that religion 
may so behave as to fall outside the vital interests 
of society. It is clear that the state may ask 
of its citizens what as Christians they are not 
permitted to give, that rehgion may absolve 



34 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

its devotees from obligations without which 
organized society would be impossible. 

This however does not meet the question in 
its essential meaning. That question should 
be stated thus: In the normal state is Chris- 
tianity an alien or the supreme citizen? Is 
Christianity blind to the need of political organ- 
ization for the highest human well-being? In 
my judgment he would be reducing Christianity 
to a sad and sentimental fragment of itself 
who should make that assertion. The prophets 
of Israel were statesmen with the profoundest 
insight into the moral organization of the 
nation. Jesus is first of all the highest prophet 
of his race, whose insights are wider and deeper 
than all others, and capable of adjustment to 
the moral needs of society in the modern world, 
in a way absolutely unique. The letter of his 
teaching may be inelastic and stiff, the spirit of 
it never. 

There is indeed a clear, inevitable risk in- 
curred in the interpretation of the great minds 
of the past. On a certain occasion when Robert 
G. Ingersoll had delivered his extremely amus- 
ing lecture upon " The Mistakes of Moses," a 
wise hearer quietly remarked that he should 
now like to hear Moses upon '' The Mistakes 
of Ingersoll." Our learning, classical and Bibh- 
cal, and indeed all our interpretations of the 
great minds of the past, might well keep in 
view this canon. Did Homer really exist? 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 35 

If he existed, was he a supreme poet or merely 
a skilful editor? Did a single mind give us the 
Ihad and the Odyssey, or did these wonderful 
epics come into being by simple popular accre- 
tion? Were the wisest of the Greeks mistaken 
in their belief that Homer was an historic per- 
son and an unrivalled artist? We have heard 
the modern classical critic upon the mistakes 
of the Greeks; it would be extremely interesting 
could we listen to the Greeks concerning the 
mistakes of the modern scholar. 

The case is the same with BibUcal interpreta- 
tion. It would be illuminative could we hear 
from an ancient contemporary authority an 
authentic account of the origin of the lyric 
poetry of Israel and the great epic of Job; 
above all, could we hear Jesus on the mistakes 
of his interpreters. I imagine that such a 
speech would create a revolution in many 
minds, in many lands. The thought of such 
a speech is enough to quicken the sense of 
responsibility as we raise the question, Was 
Jesus a pacifist? 

I. The answer to this question must depend 
upon the definition of the term " pacifist." To 
say that pacifism means Hving in loyalty to an 
ideal that contemplates a remote future in which 
war shall be no more, is to say something very 
beautiful, but not at all decisive in this debate. 
For this ideal that looks forward to the warless 
future may very well sanction war as a tem- 



36 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

porary necessity. Jesus the sovereign idealist 
might reasonably enough be counted as our 
leader here. The Caledonian scorn of Rome 
was coined in the great proverb, " Where they 
create a desert, there they proclaim peace." 
Conversely, the supreme idealist might proclaim 
the pure method of peace, when the brutal 
forces of the world made that proclamation wise. 

Again, if it is said that the Kingdom of God 
is within the soul, and that therefore physical 
force is an alien in this Kingdom of the spirit, 
we assent. In this case nothing is asserted 
that any sensible person has ever denied. 
There is always alien work for the alien force to 
do, hke the helper to the mechanic, like the 
beast of burden to his master. No alien force 
can do the work of love; it may be employed 
by love to secure an end that love alone sees, 
like the chastisement laid upon a foolish boy 
by a wise and noble father. 

If it be further asserted that the Kingdom of 
Christ is a community of souls within the state 
and yet distinct from it, and that this com- 
munity can be advanced only by spiritual 
ideas and influences, no reasonable man will 
object. If it is here declared that Christianity 
means the highest ethical life of mankind, 
and that it depends essentially for its greaten- 
ing power in the world upon nothing beyond 
its own sublime spirit, there will be few who will 
care to deny the soundness of this position. 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 37 

Nothing can enable men to see but light and 
good eyes; nothing can make men just and kind 
but true ideas and the passionate love of them. 
We can lead the horse to the water, but we 
cannot make the horse drink. We can drive 
men by force into schools, colleges, and churches, 
but we cannot make them love learning or seek 
goodness by physical propulsion. In this sense 
physical force is clearly an alien to the pure 
eternal essence of the teaching of Jesus; this 
contention I cannot find that any wise man has 
ever disputed. 

If it is further claimed that within the Chris- 
tian community a special moral code shall be 
acknowledged, according to which aggression is 
condoned, offences against persons and property 
are pardoned, brutal attacks upon Hfe and hmb 
are patiently borne, and a self-seeking, afflictive 
spirit is magnanimously tolerated, no one out- 
side the charmed circle of the consenting com- 
munity need care in any way to embarrass the 
sublime experiment. When, however, the Ser- 
mon on the Mount is cited as the unquestion- 
able warrant for this experiment, it is well to 
bear in mind that different interpretations are 
possible. As against the old law, " An eye for 
an eye and a tooth for a tooth," it is not hard to 
see the general social benignity of the precept, 
" Resist not him that is evil,'' give even the 
criminal a generous chance, and repress in your 
proceeding against him the spirit of revenge. 



38 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

So too as against the pagan code " Thou shalt 
love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy," it is as 
easy to see the social utility as it is to note the 
sublime magnanimity of the command, '* Love 
your enemies and pray for them that persecute 
you." Jesus here calls for the cleansing of the 
whole heart from base passions, inhuman mo- 
tives, brutal ends. He prescribes the spirit of 
the Most High to rule within the soul; as God 
moves in love both by the path of kindness and 
by the path of austerity, so must the child of 
God who finds in God his ideal. Here is the 
highest morality ever taught, the morality that 
is satisfied with nothing but the pure heroism 
of love. 

When, however, we are called meekly to sub- 
mit to the ruthless attack of the human brute 
because Jesus said, " Whosoever smiteth thee on 
the right cheek turn to him the other also," we 
are reminded of the example of a pious Scot. 
'' Your reHgion tells you," said the aggressor, 
" when a person smites you on one cheek, as 
I do now, to turn to him the other also." The 
other cheek was turned to this expounder of 
the Sermon on the Mount, and received its 
appropriate blow. " How do you like your 
religion now? " asked this experimenter. The 
Scot answered, " You have got, so far, only one 
half of my religion; here is the other half. 
' With what measure ye mete, it shall be mea- 
sured unto you again,'" and with that he struck 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 39 

his antagonist a solar plexus blow that put him 
into a religious ecstasy. 

Matthew Arnold's noble comment upon the 
Greek poet Sophocles, that he saw life steadily 
and saw it whole, is of high moment here. 
Nothing is more needed today in the inter- 
preter of the teaching of Jesus than the power 
to see that teaching steadily and to see it whole. 
If this method is not followed all sorts of con- 
tradictions will be found in the teaching of the 
Master. Jesus said, " I came not to destroy 
but to fulfil "; elsewhere he said, " Heaven and 
earth shall pass away, but my word shall not 
pass away." Among his utterances is this: 
" Peace I leave unto you, my peace I give unto 
you," and again this, " Think not that I came 
to send peace on the earth; I came not to send 
peace but a sword." He counsels his disciples, 
on one occasion, to go forth in absolute trust, 
making no provision for life; on another he ad- 
monishes the impoverished disciple to sell his 
cloak, if need be, and buy a sword. 

We are delivered from this series of grotesque 
contradictions, which might be greatly extended, 
when we go deeper into the mind of Jesus, when 
we understand that he is giving counsel, not in 
universal propositions, but with reference to 
the occasion. Life is the one absolute value, 
and this value lies not in life's visible continu- 
ance, but in its integrity. Infinite values are 
here, and the disciples of Jesus, while slow to 



40 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

accept the challenge of brute power, cannot 
allow themselves and their cause to be crushed 
out of the world by barbarian man. There is 
no contradiction in the behavior of the peace- 
loving men who formed Cromwell's Ironsides, 
when before going into battle they sang: '' Let 
God arise, let his enemies be scattered." The 
cause of Cromwell and his army was the free- 
dom of England from the mendacity and in- 
tolerable tyranny of the King. There is nothing 
unchristian, as a last resort, in the refusal to 
allow the worst men to degrade the best. A 
noble comprehensiveness will find all the pre- 
cepts of Jesus harmonious with one another 
when the troubled environment of man is seen 
steadily, and seen whole. 

Some of the ablest and best of my younger 
brethren in the ministry differ with me here. 
I admire their elevation of character, their 
splendid idealism, their lofty unconcern for the 
unpopularity of their views when the life of the 
truth, as they see it, is at stake, their complete 
sincerity, and their noble readiness to seal their 
faith by heroic suffering. My objection to their 
interpretation of the Gospel is that it is one- 
sided, it lacks comprehensiveness; they do not 
see the teaching of Jesus steadily, they do not 
see it whole. They speak of Christianity as if 
it were an alien in God's world, with no profound 
and everlasting affinities with the mighty in- 
stincts that burn and breathe in the human 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 41 

heart, and that are the aboriginal witness of 
God's presence with men. Christianity is thus 
a stranger in a strange land, having no eternal 
sympathies with the obligation of the husband 
and father to defend his wife and children, no 
regard for the duty of the freeman to meet 
the aggressor against his country at the bound- 
ary line, as the Greeks, first at Marathon, and 
later at Thermopylae, met the invading Persian 
hordes, no bugle blast of inspiration for the 
lover of man, and the best that man has achieved, 
devoting himself in Hfe and in death against the 
ruthless brute who would trample the fairest 
civilization into a desert waste. 

If the religion of Jesus is the Eternal thing it 
has been held to be, it must be capable of put- 
ting itself in alliance with all that is great in 
normal human beings, with all that is essential 
to the material, intellectual and moral order of 
society; it must be able to enter the entire 
circle of our interests; otherwise it cannot en- 
rich, exalt, and save them with an everlasting 
salvation. Unless we see the teaching of Jesus 
steadily, and see it whole, we shall miss its 
supreme characteristic, its fundamental kin- 
ship with the humanity of man, and therefore 
its new creative might. 

One further unavailing definition of the pacifist 
remains. It is said that Jesus is the greatest 
peacemaker in the history of man, and this is 
true. He uncovers the ground of all peace be- 



42 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

tween man and man, between man and God — 
good-will. Jesus presents in his own life the 
highest example of peace secured, manward and 
Godward, through good-will. He has thus laid 
bare to the world the eternal basis of all peace, 
all humanity. No hurricane can push this 
planet from its path so long as it is under the 
sway of the universlal power; nothing can cut 
loose or expel from peace the race that is 
grounded in fidelity to the good-will of God. 
Among men of Christian faith there is no differ- 
ence here. 

This description of the term ^' pacifist," like all 
the others that I have mentioned, does not meet 
the issue. That issue is whether Jesus, under 
all conditions and circumstances, no matter 
what the menace might be to the life of the 
home, the nation, and the sovereign interests 
of our civilization, forbade, condemned, repro- 
bated the use of physical force. Other than 
this the term '' pacifist " has no significance per- 
tinent to the American people in the present 
crisis. 

II. Let us suppose, for the sake of clear fore- 
sight of the issue involved, that Jesus did 
reprobate the use of physical force under all cir- 
cumstances and conditions. It follows that Jesus 
is thus set against some of the best instincts of 
the human heart. Here is your home; here are 
your wife, your children, and the women who 
serve in your household. A band of brutes, in 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 43 

the name of a foreign government, or in their 
own name, attack your home that they may 
mutilate, outrage, and destroy. You have in 
your possession a machine gun, and you know 
how to use it. How do you feel when you are 
told that Jesus will not permit you to defend 
from death and worse than death those under 
your roof? Which is the nearer to the God 
who made you, the prophet who is thus made 
to disarm you in the presence of ferocious 
brutality or the instinct that bids you fight and 
die that others may live? The tides against 
which no religion and no teacher can make 
headway are the tides of the Eternal as they 
flow in the instincts of motherhood and father- 
hood, as they flow in the complex of instincts 
that make the conscience of the strong in his 
sense of obhgation to the weak who have taken 
refuge in the shadow of his manhood. I can- 
not forget that when a keeper in the London 
Zoo wished to drive a lioness and her mate from 
their cage to an outer court, and when to do this 
he made a thrust at the lioness, her majestic 
mate, with a fierce roar and an instantaneous 
leap, threw himself as a terrible shield against 
the keeper. Never was I more impressed by 
the majesty of a primeval instinct; I felt that 
God's moral being spoke in the self-oblivious 
valor of the great beast; I felt that this same 
instinct in man comes straight and swift from 
man's Maker, that nothing can cancel its mean- 



44 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

ing or annul its authority. The teaching that 
puts Jesus against these instincts would, if it 
were true, make it impossible for me to remain 
his disciple; because fresh from the Infinite I 
hear voices within me that tell me that the 
conduct I have imagined is that of a coward 
and a sneak. 

Once more this interpretation of the teaching 
of Jesus puts him in opposition to those who 
have defended civilization by their suffering 
and death. Is it not a grave thing to put 
Jesus against the two supreme patriots in our 
history, Washington and Lincoln? Is it not 
cruel, without evidence rising to demonstration, 
to deny to Jesus any part in the lives of those 
who founded the American Republic, in the 
lives of those who bled and died that it might 
be refounded in universal freedom? Is it not 
shocking to exclude from the kingdom of Jesus 
the multitudes of heroic men and suffering 
women who have achieved for nations and 
races the opportunity to live, to grow, and to 
make their imperishable contribution to the 
richness and fulness of our human world? For 
myself I cannot believe in any such attenuated 
Jesus, abstracted from the central conflict of 
the world, with no part in the tragedy of hu- 
man history, a lovely incident only in the stern 
evolution of the kingdom of man. 

III. We come, finally, to the words of the 
Master which, in my judgment, contain a con- 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 45 

elusive negative answer to the question, Was 
Jesus a pacifist? " Render therefore unto 
Csesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto 
God the things that are God's." In dividing 
the world into two great hemispheres, one for 
Cffisar and the other for God, I do not under- 
stand Jesus to mean that religion should have 
nothing to do with politics, and that poKtics 
have no part in reUgion. I understand Jesus 
to teach that the things of religion are primarily 
in the sphere of the spirit, that they concern a 
man's standing, and the standing of a race be- 
fore God. Religion deals primarily with the 
inner, invisible side of life, as that rises into the 
presence of the King Immortal and Invisible. 
Again, I understand that Jesus meant to recog- 
nize the problems of national or imperial gov- 
ernment, in their nature, and within their own 
sphere, as ultimate in society. 

From this point of view what may we safely 
infer concerning the functions of government as 
approved by Jesus? There should be the enact- 
ment of just laws; the wise and impartial inter- 
pretation of these laws; the sure enforcement of 
these just decisions where men refuse volun- 
tarily to abide by them. 

Enforcement of the decisions of authorized 
and just judges; of this we may be sure that 
Jesus would approve. The word " enforcement " 
contains the key to the whole debate. Where 
the members of a state are not all of them per- 



46 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

feet, contentions will arise; where these con- 
tentions are settled before the proper tribunal, 
and where the defeated person refuses to com- 
ply with the decision, force must be applied. 
Where men are both good and bad, law- 
abiding and lawless; where society is ordered 
in law and in living; where the enemies of 
society surround it, — the vagrant, the thief, 
the villain, the murderer, — one function of 
government is clear. These enemies of society 
must be restrained by force; they must be made 
by the penalties imposed upon them a terror 
to other candidates for war upon society. The 
whole high order of human society rests back 
upon the physical force whereby the righteous 
judgment of society is made to prevail. So- 
ciety in this world cannot exist without force. 
The safety of life, of property, and freedom must 
evermore, as an ultimate appeal, be guarded by 
physical force. To make the great Master dis- 
sent from this clear necessity of civilized society 
would be to reduce his sublime teaching to 
foolishness. 

There are the enemies of society within its 
bounds; there are the enemies of society be- 
yond its bounds. In the days of the American 
Revolution there were the Tory sympathizers 
with British oppression; they had to be taken 
care of, they were taken care of very well in- 
deed. There were the British armies invading 
the. colonies, desolating the colonies, seeking to 



I 
CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 47 

reduce them from freedom to vassalage. What 
shall be done here? Shall American freemen 
consent to this shame, submit to the invader, 
bid the tyrant welcome, and allow him to de- 
stroy in the colonial life whatever he chooses? 
Not for an hour. Oppose him on the spot; if 
he means war let it begin here. War at that 
moment, and in that meaning of it, was essen- 
tial to the life of American freedom. 

Again, to make Jesus dissent from this clear 
necessity of the society of freemen is to reduce 
his divine teaching to foolishness. He recog- 
nized the necessity of government; he recog- 
nized, therefore, the further necessity of phy- 
sical force to protect society against the enemies 
within its bounds; he recognized, therefore, the 
ultimate necessity, when all other ways and 
means had failed, as a last woful resort, the 
appeal to arms in a purely defensive warfare 
against the enemies of society, and for main- 
taining in being the sovereign achievements of 
civilized and Christianized man. 

Jesus is the highest prophet of the meaning 
of human life. For him human life was personal 
and social; the individual person was essential 
to society, and society was essential to the 
individual person. For Jesus society was an 
organization of persons, in this time world, 
from the moral being of the Eternal. Society 
was a Kingdom of God; it was assailed by the 
subtlest foes within and by the crudest foes 



48 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

from without. Nations were in jeopardy every 
hour from the traitor within, and from the brutal 
aggressor without. The nation is in duty bound 
to conserve its highest Hfe, and with this, to con- 
serve the highest achievements of mankind. For 
this end it must stand on guard, it must not for- 
get that the price of hberty is eternal vigilance. 
It must be prepared to fight the beautiful fight, 
to defend itself against wanton aggression, un- 
just power, ruthless and contemptuous assault 
upon all that it holds dear. 

Jesus held that some things are worth dying 
for. He might easily have run away and es- 
caped death if he had been willing to save his 
Hfe by the betrayal of his cause. His cause was 
his life; it was the joy set before him; for it he 
endured the cross and despised the shame. 
What he held as truth for himself, he holds as 
truth for his disciples. There are some things 
worth dying for. Among these are the sanc- 
tity of womanhood, the safety of children, the 
security of the things essential to man's life, 
the integrity of the State, the majesty of right- 
eousness, the honor and freedom of the United 
States of America. If these precious things 
can be secured by wise delay, by moral power 
alone, let us lift our hearts in thanksgiving to 
the Highest; if moral power is finally set at 
naught, let the aggressor meet the invincible 
defender of the humanity of the nation and 
the humanity of the world. I cannot think 



CHRISTIAN AND CITIZEN 49 

of those whose devotion to the uttermost re- 
ceives fitting and beautiful remembrance in 
this memorial flag; I cannot think of the 
generation of youth, whom they represent, who 
went serenely to death that their country might 
live; I cannot think of Washington and Lincoln 
as in imagination they stand today by the 
moving and mighty symbol of their country, 
without the assurance of His presence and 
approval who gave His life a ransom for the 
world. 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 



For where thy treasure is there will thy 
heart he also. 

— Matt. 6 : 21. 



IV 
AMERICAN LOYALTY 

When we think of the many races that go to 
make the one hundred miUion Americans of 
today, what assurances have we of their loyalty 
to this new country in times of international 
crisis? Here are men from every nation under 
heaven. Is there any outpouring upon them of 
high power, any descent of patriotic fire, any 
fresh consciousness of the Holy Spirit of political 
freedom and hope, mighty enough to bind these 
races into one vast brotherhood of loyal and 
proud Americans? 

We must confess, at the outset, to the pres- 
ence of two serious disadvantages. The first 
is the absence of homogeneousness. Homo- 
geneousness is a mighty factor in national 
unity. Where the people are of one stock, 
where they are from center to circumference 
kith and kin, there, in all times of crisis, national 
feeling is wont to go with the universal move- 
ment and strength of the tide. No part of 
the nation has power to go the other way; it 
is all one, and it runs to the flood as by the will 
of the Infinite. This wonder of homogeneous 
strength we do not possess; this initial, natural, 
inevitable loyalty is not ours. 

Nor have we Americans the instinct of loyalty 



54 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

to our country born of history. Whether we 
know it or not, the voices of history sing in 
the soul of a nation, and charm it into unity, 
both when the song is a dirge and a paeon. 
In the fibre of our flesh, in blood and brain 
there are stored the subtlest memories, the 
most potent susceptibilities. Men are largely 
the resultant of racial experiences in the historic 
environment in which their ancestors have 
lived. They are born with instinctive loves for 
nature as she appears in a particular country. 
Even the universal features of nature, sunrise 
and sunset, the morning and evening stars, 
take on new beauty and splendor because they 
shine through the dear heavens that bend above 
the beloved land. For these peoples nature 
is bathed and transfigured in the most moving 
human associations; it is never beheld except 
through the eyes of racial achievement, suffer- 
ing, love and tears. Nature becomes a coun- 
try whose homes are founded and whose 
cradles are rocked upon a land of hallowed 
graves. Loyalty here rises as by the force of 
gravity, it is pushed upward by the unseen 
might of immemorial generations, it calls aloud 
in the strength of great instincts; it can be un- 
done only by the wreck of all social order that 
comes from the sway of the tyrant. This vast 
assurance of unity and loyalty we possess only 
in a minority of our people, and it would be 
folly to underestimate our poverty here. 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 55 

We must seek for assurances of the loyalty 
of Americans, of all races, in other spheres of 
human nature: in immediate experience of 
good, in the strength of reason, in the magic 
of just imagination, and in the sense of obliga- 
tion to the future. These fountains of loyalty 
will be found, I am persuaded, abundant and 
perennial. 

1. I name immediate experience of benefit 
as the first universal assurance of American 
loyalty. This does not hold for adventurers, 
shirks or humbugs. We discount them. We 
aflirm that for the healthy, the industrious, the 
enterprising and the earnest of all races it is 
good to be here. Work is surer here than else- 
where for the man wilhng to work, wages are 
higher, food is more abundant and of finer 
quality, the conditions of life are more whole- 
some, the chances to rise in the grade of one's 
work are better; while the opportunities for 
personal improvement by education, and the 
sympathy of good men with aspiring youth are 
in America simply incomparable. 

When the children are made part of this 
experience the assurance of loyalty becomes 
much stronger. The children go to the public 
schools; they read the history of the Revolu- 
tion; they take pride in it as their own, and 
sometimes they ask, as an Englishman's boy 
did, after reading a description of the battle 
of Bunker Hill, '* Father, be you an Enghsh- 



56 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

man? '' " Yes, my boy," was the reply. " Then 
we licked you." When the poor immigrant 
finds it possible to send his gifted boys and girls 
to college; when he sees them treated with 
respect; when he sees them graduate, as is 
often the case, among the first scholars of their 
class; when he further sees them thus equipped 
entering life with alluring prospects of success, 
he is, as I have found, in many instances, 
bowed down with a sense of gratitude to the 
country in which this experience of good is 
possible. Thousands of humble parents, in the 
last twenty years, have gone on Commence- 
ment day to Harvard, Yale, Columbia, all 
the greater colleges and universities of the 
country, to witness the triumph of their sons 
and daughters, to give expression to their 
pride and joy, and to confess grateful allegiance 
to the institutions of learning that have thus 
taught, inspired, wrought into worth and power 
the lives of those dearest to them. Here is a 
shuttle flying without ceasing in the high 
schools and colleges of the land, threaded with 
the sense of benefit, on the loom of unrestricted 
opportunity, weaving the robe, in royal purple 
and gold, of American loyalty. 

There is another immediate experience of good 
that issues in loyal love for this country. Im- 
migrants leave behind them needy kinsmen, 
parents, sisters and others of remoter relation- 
ship. The true-hearted, who in this new land 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 57 

do not forget the old, who in founding families 
here remember with tender and devout affec- 
tion the home circles in which their life began, 
are able to send generous help to those in dis- 
tress. They are able to do this without the 
sense of hardship; they are able to do what they 
could not have done had they never come 
hither. From the surplus of wages earned in 
this richer land, they enjoy the privilege denied 
them before, the privilege of making the exist- 
ence of their needy kindred in the old home less 
of a burden, more of a happiness. Picture this 
privilege when it concerns a beloved mother. 
Look at her in age, infirmity and want; think 
of the good she has done, the sons and daughters 
that she has given to the world. Imagine her 
life of toil, anxiety, tenderness and tears; life 
has taken at each stage all that she had to give; 
it has taken at last her strength of body and 
her vigor of heart. Others of her children are 
themselves so burdened that they can hardly 
come to her rescue. Several of them have come 
here; they have prospered, and they are able 
to turn the stormy afternoon of their mother's 
life into sunshine, and the evening into peace. 
The cottage of many an aged mother is made 
comfortable and cheery by day, and lights are 
made to twinkle brightly from its windows in 
the oncoming night, because of the constant 
and generous devotion of sons and daughters in 
America. When the end has come, and the 



58 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

beloved dead is laid to rest in the ancient 
church-yard, and the memorial stone is set in 
dear remembrance to guard the sacred spot, 
the sense of the privilege freely bestowed by 
America, to utter the feelings of veneration in 
acts of veneration, rises into a kind of religious 
homage to this beneficent land. 

When the three disciples of Jesus who were 
selected to share the transcendent vision of 
their Master's transfiguration were under the 
wonder of this privilege, one of them cried out, 
"Master, it is good for us to be here. Let us 
build three tabernacles, one for thee, one for 
Moses and one for Elijah." The immediate ex- 
perience of good, rare and exalted good, good 
that is good for the entire circle of kindred 
lives, good that is good for the worthy who have 
spent their strength in love and service, good 
for age, leaning on its staff and in want, issues 
forever in the passionate desire to build a 
permanent grateful abode there. Our country 
has given us these immediate experiences of 
good; therefore we love it, with a grateful and 
loyal devotion. 

2. There is next the work of reason. Re- 
flection upon life here, in contrast to life in the 
old country, issues in a fresh experience of good. 
The first feeling of the immigrant is apt to be 
a perverse sentiment. Everything in the old 
country stands transfigured. This is part of 
life, and is both good and evil. 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 59 

" Care and trial seem at last 

Through memory's sunset air, 
Like mountain ranges overpast, 
In purple distance fair." 

The new American has to watge a battle with 
this perverse feeling, which is not a pure recol- 
lection but often a pure hallucination. Every- 
thing in the old country is at first glorified, 
everything in the new is at first belittled, if 
not bitterly reproached. America, it was hoped, 
would prove itself to be paradise; instead it is 
a land where thorns and thistles grow, where 
men eat their bread in the sweat of their brow. 
It thus appears as a sullen and ugly disappoint- 
ment; the old country, glowing in the rosy 
light of the far-away sunrise, in spite of the 
years of trouble and sorrow, is now felt to be 
paradise, and it has been left behind and aban- 
doned for this ! While this perverse feeling 
continues, this wild juggler with truth, this 
necromancer who paints old sorrows in heavenly 
colors, who darkens angel faces with the dye 
of fiends, there is no hope for reasonable com- 
parison and reconciliation. 

Homesickness is a fearful malady, but it is 
not incurable. It is a self-limiting disease, 
and if the patient does not die, time will prove 
the great effective physician, as in other human 
afflictions, so in this. Homesickness resem- 
bles a certain extreme alcoholic disturbance; 
it fills the palatial dwelling where it is with 



60 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

vipers and demons; it transforms the squalid 
hut where it is not, where it longs to be, into 
a place of celestial freedom and peace. Intoxi- 
cation at its worst, if the patient is isolated 
long enough, comes at length to soberness; 
homesickness, however long it may run riot, 
eventually gives way to sound sense and calm 
judgment. Then it is that a new epoch arrives 
in the life of the American immigrant. Reason 
emerges, calls for the plain facts, sets the old 
and the new in fair comparison, and upon due 
deliberation goes forward to a just conclusion. 

Friends are as numerous here as in the old 
country, employers are more just and consider- 
ate, men are rated, in this land as nowhere 
else, on their merit, worth is surer of recognition, 
capacity of promotion, energy of success; be- 
sides, there is a surrounding atmosphere of 
sympathy with pluck, daring, devotion to one's 
task and faith in one's ideals. Here the balance 
of goods is clearly in favor of the new country. 
Through a reasonable mind the immigrant is 
winning a new love for America. 

In the old world society, as a general thing, 
is still deeply influenced by the feeling of caste. 
There is the King, there is the royal household; 
there is the duke, the marquis, the earl, the vis- 
count, the baron, and the poor first rung of the 
aristocratic ladder, the Sir somebody. It is 
true that the feudalistic order of society has 
received many hard knocks; it is true that a 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 61 

million voices roll into all sorts of aristocratic 
ears the great plea of Burns for essential man- 
hood: 

" A prince can make a belted knight, 

A marquis, duke, and a' that : 
But an honest man's aboon his might, 

Guid faith he maunna fa' that! 
For a' that, and a' that, 

Their dignities, an' a' that, 
The pith o' sense, and pride o' worth, 

Are higher rank than a' that." 

Still, in the most democratic countries of Europe 
these words are more or less of a defiant protest 
against a dominant adverse order; while here 
they utter with trumpet tones, and amid uni- 
versal approval, the prevailing social sentiment. 
The exceptions, in the person of the snob, the 
plutocrat, and other abnormal Americans, men 
and women, are after all purely incidental and 
completely insignificant. The atmosphere is, 
broadly speaking, wholly favorable to the recog- 
nition of noble character as everywhere the 
supreme thing in American society. Thus as 
the American immigrant ponders this new 
phenomenon, it commends itself to his reason; 
the longer he considers it the surer he is that 
here is one of the best and most hopeful things 
in the world. 

The next step is plain. Here in the dignity 
of toil, in the doctrine that usefulness to society 
is always a badge of honor; here in expansive 



62 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

social freedom, in the equality of honest man 
with honest man; here in the public contempt 
for idleness and wealth devoted to mere display 
and lust; here in the aboriginal American idea 
of the intrinsic worth of nothing but manhood 
and womanhood, is the greatest chance on 
earth for the free and unrestricted development 
of the best forces in our nature, — diligence, 
skill, conscientiousness, self-respect, in one great 
phrase, the humanity of man. Here we are 
not serfs, we are no man's tools; we are not 
machines or drudges, we are citizens of the 
United States of America. We cannot be 
ruled without our consent. Our rulers repre- 
sent us; they are accountable to us; our re- 
lation to them is not that of subjects to a sov- 
ereign, but that of a sovereign to his responsible 
servants. 

Slowly the economic, the social and the polit- 
ical advantages here rise into the heart of the 
American immigrant through his understanding. 
America means for him, as he reflects upon its 
structure, a new world. Therefore with the 
consent of his whole mind he comes to identify 
his existence and fate with the existence and 
fate of the American Republic. 

3. The loyalty of all true Americans is great- 
ened by the power of a just imagination. Imag- 
ination is the telescope of the mind; it makes 
visible blazing realities that otherwise would 
remain invisible. There is the size of this 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 63 

country. The travel of the average American 
can lead to no adequate notion of this reality. 
The eye takes in but a small part of the district 
where one lives. This continental land can be 
seen only through the telescope of imagination. 
When the western limit of Alaska lies in the 
glow of sunset, the eastern limit of Maine is 
burning in the fire of sunrise. Here is a Re- 
public on which the sun never sets. One sees 
imagination at work representing the enchant- 
ing physical greatness of our country, in such 
familiar anecdotes as these: An American in 
England is afraid to go out after dark, lest he 
may fall ofT the island into the sea, There is 
not enough water in the Thames and the Severn, 
the Tweed and the Clyde, to gargle one of the 
mouths of the Mississippi. The United States 
is bounded on the north by the Aurora BoreaHs, 
on the south by the Southern Cross, on the 
east by the Primeval Chaos, and on the west 
by the Day of Judgment. Size is always im- 
pressive. In the winter months, look, of a 
clear evening, at the star Sirius, the brightest 
splendor in the stellar universe. Read the 
calculated dimensions and brilHancy of this 
star made by astronomers, and with imagina- 
tion thus informed, allow this superlative wonder 
of the heavens to cast its spell over you. In 
this way you will come to understand the unique 
impressiveness of the physical magnitude of the 
Republic. When to this we add scenery un- 



64 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

surpassed, economic resources unequalled, the 
possibility of homes and food for hundreds of 
millions of prosperous and happy human be- 
ings, we have on the mere physical level of ex- 
istence a nation with a unique appeal to the 
imagination of its citizens. 

Let imagination paint another picture. Think 
what American intellect and energy have done, 
within one hundred years, for our people and 
for the world, in the development of the eco- 
nomic resources of the nation. It is a miracu- 
lous story, to be told only in the language of 
inspired dreams: " The wilderness and the 
solitary place shall be glad for them, and the 
desert shall rejoice and blossom as the rose." 
American inventions are in the service of the 
civilized world. American science has an hon- 
orable place wherever science is known, and in 
one science at least, astronomy, America has 
for the last thirty years led the world. In 
applied science our country is fast becoming 
the equal of the best; our technical schools and 
state universities are putting scientific intelli- 
gence in command of the economic resources 
and needs of our people. Education has be- 
come a passion among our youth, and the story 
of the wealth devoted to education in the last 
fifty years reads like a fairy tale. Religion here 
is a reality where it is anything. The saddest 
revelation of this war concerns Christianity. 
In Europe among rulers and men of power it 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 65 

is little more than an academic interest, a senti- 
mental memory. Among Protestants and Cath- 
olics alike, for the time at least, the glory is 
departed. Nowhere is there a great prophet of 
hope, a church with a mighty forward look, a 
community of men swayed by moral faith in the 
universe, and in mankind. The backward 
look is great, the retrospect is an enchantment, 
yesterday illumines the world with its character 
and power; today is a day of darkness and 
tomorrow is midnight. The hope of the Catho- 
lic faith is here; the future of essential religion 
is here; the forward look is here, and it is great 
with high expectation. 

All these realities do not appeal with equal 
power to all our people; to many of our people 
the higher among these realities make no ap- 
peal. Yet as a grand totality, these realities 
make our country the wonder and splendor that 
it is in the imagination of all true citizens. 
Magnitude, wealth, beauty, intellect, — practi- 
cal and scientific, — religion, whether in the 
ancient form of authority or in the freedom of 
this modern day, and the future, promising the 
richest realization for the highest dreams of a 
great people; here is our country, as it lives in 
the imagination of the millions that love it. 

This Republic belongs to our people; it is 
theirs to enjoy, to defend, to heighten in worth, 
and to transmit to future generations. I be- 
lieve that a new sense of ownership and obhga- 



66 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

tion is almost sure to come out of the present 
crisis. America is ours to enjoy, ours to guard, 
ours to live for, ours if need be to die for; and 
if this shall be the mood of our people, a new 
America shall arise fairer still and yet more 
beloved. This is one of the reasons why I 
favor the universal military training of all fit 
young men. It puts the nation into the imagi- 
nation of youth, as their nation; it lifts the 
country before the eyes of our people as a 
glorious banner; it calls for service and hard- 
ship and trained manhood, and it gives in re- 
turn a new consciousness of the worth of the 
RepubUc. If you would love at your best, do 
something for that which you love. Parents 
love their children most when they have done 
their best for them; children love their parents 
most when they become their support and solace. 
The fountain of love is opened to the infinite 
depths only by unselfish service. The flag 
of the nation presented this day to this church, 
by members in our communion who fought in 
the war for the preservation of the Union, in 
sacred memory of the men of four regiments, 
represents a love made mighty, and lasting as 
life, by sacrificial service. Ask our youth to 
dream dreams of the country that is theirs, to 
train to defend it, in all times of need, as part 
of their obhgation, and the Republic will open 
new fountains of loyalty and enthusiastic de- 
votion in all hearts. Our ideal of education is 



AMERICAN LOYALTY 67 

of a nation universally trained for life and all 
its essential interests, and thus maintaining 
through all changes its democratic character, 
a nation owned, loved, served and defended by 
the sovereign people. 

Can we doubt that such a nation will always 
command, in every day of crisis, the homage 
of its people? Can we doubt the loyalty to this 
beneficent Republic, if worse comes to worst, of 
any class of our citizens, English, Irish, Scottish, 
Scandinavian, French, Italian, German? My 
pro-German Irish friend who sells newspapers 
at the Park Street entrance to the subway is 
typical. His confession is this : '* I am with the 
Germans till they attack this country; then 
I am agin them forever.'* 

For the only adequate philosophy of American 
loyalty we come now to my text. There are 
among human beings wise love and unwise. 
Wise love appears with worth in the object of it, 
and saving benefit in the subject of it. Unwise 
love is made evident by two things, the absence 
of worth in the object of it, the absence of sav- 
ing benefit in the subject of it. Cordelia loves 
worth in her father, worth in her husband; her 
soul is saved by love. Romola, in George 
Eliot's great novel, loves Tito; hence her sor- 
row. Her greatest sorrow is that to save her 
soul she must cease to love the worthless object 
of it. 

This is the truth that rises into clearness, like 



68 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

the world in the Ught of morning, in the great 
words of Jesus: '' For where thy treasure is 
there will thy heart be also." Love and trea- 
sure go together always. Where the treasure 
is only a fancy, a dream; where it is not a reality 
love must eventually die. Where the treasure 
is unimaginably great, there love goes from 
strength to strength, till both the treasure and 
the love find themselves eternally one in the 
heavenly world. 

Because the America that we behold and love 
has in it worth immeasurable, and because we 
who love America know the saving benefit 
that our love and our service bring, we are 
confident of our loyalty to our country in her 
day of crisis, our increasing attachment, our 
ever-deepening sense of gratitude, our devotion 
to the uttermost. We shall see to it that no 
weapon formed against her shall prosper; we 
pledge her our best endeavor and our highest 
prayer that in the immemorial mornings and 
evenings of coming time, she may appear an 
ever greater nation, fairer in the light of ap- 
proaching and lovelier in the glow of receding 
day; and when at last we must bid her farewell, 
we shall leave her in the secret place of the 
Most High, and under the shadow of the 
Almighty. 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 



"And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will 
draw all men unto me.'' — John 12 : 32. 



V 

THE NATION AND HUMANITY 

There is a world reference to every human life. 
Somewhere Emerson says something like this: 
"Strike the rock with your hammer and the jar 
is felt in Jupiter." Emerson's contention would 
seem to be that there is a universal impact to 
every man's life. The greater the individual 
person, the vaster must be his impact upon the 
whole. 

The Greeks with true philosophic instinct 
named one of their gods the " world-shaker." 
In clearest insight, and in the noblest manner, 
one of the greatest of New Testament writers 
calls the Eternal God the shaker of heaven and 
earth; here the entire universe trembles under 
the impact of the Infinite Presence. 

This fact of the world reference of every 
human life underhes the Christian vision of 
Jesus. He is the supreme human being; as 
such he has a world impact of the mightiest 
kind. This world influence is conspicuous in 
his death. Whatever else it may have been, 
it was a death with a meaning wide as the 
world, and flowing into eternity, like the light 
of the sun that brightens the whole earth and 
goes forever onward. It was a death in the 
interest of humanity; it was and is the su- 



72 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

premely availing death. It set in everlasting 
light the spirit in man, his kinship with God, 
his essential need, — truth, beauty, love and 
freedom; his need of society organized in love 
and freedom, in the pursuit of ideal ends and 
cleansed by the tides of the Eternal. 

It must be added that death was only an 
incident in the life of Jesus, that it is only an 
incident in the life of true man everywhere. It 
is not to be foolishly sought, neither is it to 
be ignobly shunned. It is to be treated as an 
incident. The main thing is life. Death, when 
it is impressive, gains all its impressiveness from 
the life that has been lived; for example, the 
death of gifted American youth fighting in 
France for high ideals, and wearing in our 
imagination the halo of splendid devotion. The 
beauty of such a death is but the color hidden 
in the sunlight that has illumined the long hours 
of the day displayed in the splendor of sunset. 
Death is dependent for its high character upon 
life, and life is dependent for worth upon its 
causes. When our cause is the well-being and 
defence of humanity; when we love and serve 
that cause in life, the worth it has wrought into 
our character spreads itself upon the dark 
clouds of death in divine fire. 

The United States stands under the law here 
indicated. No nation liveth unto itself, no na- 
tion dieth unto itself; its universal influence 
is simply inevitable. Whether with alliances or 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 73 

without them, this RepubHc is in the thought 
of the world. In every capital in Europe and 
in every camp, our country is a recurrent theme 
of interest and discussion. Our judgments and 
our deeds as a people are reported in the lead- 
ing journals in every civilized state, and at their 
firesides, the families of these various nations 
are weighing our character in the balances. 
About this we cannot be in doubt. This nation 
is now wielding a world influence and delivering 
a world impact. The only question that re- 
mains open concerns the nature of our world 
influence, the character of our world impact. 

1. We are the one nation for whom this 
war has brought fabulous increase in wealth. 
Are we satisfied with this as the whole story of 
the world concern of the American Republic? 
Is our impact to be mainly upon the treasury 
of the nations fighting the battle of civilization? 
Is our chief interest in the tragic conflict the 
purpose to set free the stream of gold in Europe 
and to make deep and sure the channel to our 
door? Are we to lay tribute upon the necessities 
of those whose cause we approve, whose contest 
seems to us essential to the free life of man- 
kind, and for every economic service rendered, 
exact the highest attainable reward? Are we 
to continue satisfied to reap in gold while others 
sow in blood, to swell the bank account of our 
citizens while others feed the grave with the 
best and bravest of the lovers of freedom? 



74 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

Through the President of -the United States and 
through the Congress of the United States, the 
American people, from ocean to ocean, and 
from the Canadian border to the Gulf of Mexico 
have answered, '' NO! " 

To the believer in a moral civilization, to the 
lover and servant of the values that constitute 
our human world, the naked economic process 
is an unrelieved horror. To look upon the war 
that today darkens half the earth, that threatens 
the humanity of the world, as simply an economic 
opportunity, as a chance to exact the richest 
reward for the smallest service, is nothing less 
than covenanting with malign spirits, is nothing 
other than playing the role of Judas Iscariot, 
not for his stake of thirty pieces of silver, but 
for a billion or two added to the billions already 
made. Take for your service all that j^ou can 
exact, turn the dire need of friendly nations 
into a new market immensely favorable to you, 
is doubtless the accepted maxim of the unmiti- 
gated economic process; it must be added that 
the unmitigated economic process is below the 
level of the well-behaved savage. It is not true, 
it can never be true, that the only or the chief 
relation that the American people want to this 
terrible menace to the humanity of man, is a 
purely economic relation. It is not true, it can 
never be true that our people are indignant with 
Germany simply because she has kept our ships 
in port, because she has broken the market that 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 75 

ran so mightily in our favor. It is true, and the 
truth is now declared to the world, that the 
American people demand a relation to the 
calamity that threatens the freedom and happi- 
ness of mankind, at their own cost, and on a 
higher level, to their own immeasurable gain, 
in behalf of the dearest possessions of civilized 
man. When the issue is the fate of democracy, 
justice, humanity, when the enemy is the repu- 
diator of all moral obligation, the wielder against 
the men, women and children of all nations of 
the naked sword, the untamed apostle of pitiless 
warfare upon everything valued by decent hu- 
man beings, the American people cry out with 
one voice, that enemy is our enemy, that foe 
we must fight till his reason returns to him. 

2. Here we meet the creed of the mad econo- 
mist, sell your goods in the market most favor- 
able to you, and buy in the market the least 
favorable to the person who sells to you; get 
the most for what you give, and give the least 
for the most you can get; that I take to be the 
naked economic process. What the individual 
would be ashamed to do to his friends, in their 
distress, it is held that the group of individuals 
called a state, not only may do, but must do 
even when united with friendly powers in oppos- 
ing the common enemy of mankind. The 
economic process, in its utter nakedness, is held 
by the economist of whom I am thinking to be 
the ultimate unalterable law of human society. 



76 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

Other aspects of life are determined by it; it is 
determined by none. It is worth while to exam- 
ine this proposition that we may see how com- 
pletely it contradicts the normal life of society. 
The man who tries to live by bread alone, or 
who makes the economic process sovereign over 
life, is not even a decent animal. Your canary 
adds to appetite a bath and a song, a friendly 
perception that you are you, and the instinct 
of play in response to the instinct of play in 
you. Even here the bare economic process is 
not enough, nor is it the source of the main 
enjoyment. Your dog does better; he wants 
a bone, yet he will not touch it till you tell him 
it is his, and he will drop it when you command 
him to drop it. He wants food, but food is not 
enough; he wants your approval, your affec- 
tion, your companionship. There is a genuine 
influence exerted by the higher interests over 
the lower, in the case of a decent dog. You 
have watched robins when caring for their young. 
They have a police system, and let a squirrel 
or cat appear, and the community of robins 
springs to arms to hurl the invader back. I 
have seen a hen, a creature not famous for 
courage, attack a cat till it fled, attack a dog 
and drive him from the yard in which she was 
feeding her young. I have seen a weasel, that 
fierce little fighter for blood, met on his way to 
the nest of a lapwing by a regiment of lapwings. 
By organization of power, and by the skilful 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 77 

use of their strong wings, they knocked the weasel 
first this way and then that, till sore with blows 
he fled in defeat. That nest belonged only to 
one pair of birds; here was a whole community 
moved with sympathy, and risking life for a 
single bird family, in that community. The 
human being for whom the economic process 
is a naked, unmitigated fact is simply below the 
level of a decent animal. 

When we look into the economic life of society 
we find two ultimate forces competing for the 
control of it. The first form of social organiza- 
tion that I describe I call normal, because it 
ends in the vast superaddition to the economic 
process of faith in the moral being of the uni- 
verse, a faith that returns to change the whole 
character of the economic process as night by 
day. Here work is in the great heartening 
sense of fellowship; it is brightened by the play 
of humor; it is the parent of some of our best 
friendships. Work has for its final motive love, 
the love of the old home where father and mother 
live, the love of the prospective home, the love 
of the actual home. The mainspring of the 
economic clock is love; break that, and your 
economic order is a piece of dead mechanism. 
There follows the desire of knowledge and the 
sense of beauty; science and art are thus added 
to the economic process. There is the faith that 
man is hving in a moral universe, and that he is 
accountable to that moral universe for his be- 



78 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

havior. Wherever that faith is sincerely held 
it enters the whole sphere of human interests 
as the morning sun enters our atmosphere, 
making all things new. 

What about the abnormal form of economic 
organization? By what is it ruled? Fellow- 
ship, humor, friendship, love; the glory of edu- 
cation for effective living, and for a broad share 
in the best human experience are here. Relig- 
ion, too, is here in name, and sometimes, doubt- 
less, in power. The whole structure, however, of 
society is made to culminate in the lust for con- 
quest, and the method employed is brute force. 
For example we turn to Germany. The organi- 
zation of German society terminates in tyranny. 
Fellowship, humor, friendship, home, education, 
the ideals of science, art and religion issue in one 
abnormal combative instinct. "Deutschland iiber 
alles" is the cry of the nation whose marvel- 
lous social organization has issued, not in faith 
in the moral being of man, not in faith in the 
moral being of the universe, but in an insane 
self-assertion, in insolence to other social or- 
ganizations of human beings, in a mad comba- 
tive instinct, in a wild passion to dominate the 
world. As faith in a moral Deity brings into 
social organization the transforming soul of the 
Eternal humanity, so the substitution for faith 
in the moral being of the Infinite, of the foul 
myth of the divinity of the state, the state as 
administered by autocrats and war-lords, intro- 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 79 

duces into the blood of the people the poison of 
enmity against all those who block their way to 
power. The good and kind people of Germany 
have been taught to believe that as it is enough 
for the dog to eat of the crumbs that fall from 
his master's table, so it is enough for all other 
nations to be allowed to subsist and serve under 
Prussian autocratic rule. The final super- 
addition to the economic process determines 
whether you are to have a society ruled by the 
ideal of Christian humanity, or governed by 
the ruthless might of unmoral ambition. 

The mihtarist is simply the unmitigated 
economist armed. His mind is denuded of all 
faith in the moral being of man, of all faith in the 
moral character of the universe. His rule is the 
will to power, all thoughts and feelings that 
would restrain power are to him mere fictions 
and emotions. The German method of war is 
the straight, logical expression of this mood. 
The mind behind the Teutonic armies is far 
more serious than they; that mind is one of 
blank atheism and inhumanity, with every rag 
of restraint and shame thrown to the winds. 

It is this mind behind armies that America 
must defy. We refuse to believe that this mon- 
ster represents the mind of the German people, 
that he represents the heart of the German 
people. He has screened the truth from their 
eyes, and made them believe as facts the foul 
dreams of his own ambition. He has fooled 



80 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

them into the conviction that they were in 
danger of annihilation at the hands of the 
wicked nations now at war with them. He 
has made them drunk with the insolent assump- 
tion that they are the immeasurable superiors 
of all other races. He has lured them on with 
the wild illusion that the world is theirs to sub- 
due, rule and plunder. He has made the Ger- 
man people believe his lie; and he has shut 
them in from the illuminating opinion of the 
sane world beyond them. He has done this 
with terrible strength, but he has only suc- 
ceeded in plunging his race into a temporary 
delusion. The German race cannot be crushed, 
not even by its present heartless rulers. It will 
awake some morning, as from a horrible night- 
mare, to enter once more the ways of peaceful 
service to mankind, again to give to the world 
leaders in science, in ideas, in learning, in relig- 
ious freedom, and in the deepest worship of the 
Eternal God. Our conflict is not really with the 
German race; it is with the monster who has 
bewitched and debauched them, and who as his 
unwitting instrument has made them, for the 
hour, the enemy of mankind, and driven them 
in the face of the moral faith of the world. 

3. The United States is now at war with 
Germany; it is therefore our Christian duty to 
define to ourselves our reasons for this serious 
decision. For myself I have hoped that the 
United States might be able with honor to re- 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 81 

main neutral. War is to me what it is to every 
right-thinking man, a horror. There is to me 
only one thing worse than war, and that is base 
surrender to foreign military menace, of the 
rights, fruits and possessions of civilized man. 
I have hoped and believed that for this country 
war might be averted. I still hope that our part 
in the conflict may be limited to the sea, to 
possible disturbances on our borders, to vast 
credits to the Allies at minimum interest, and 
to sharing otherwise our resources and power. 
It is far from any wish of mine, except under 
direst necessity, to see this nation plunged in 
the war now raging on the continent of Europe. 
If we are forced to this by the logic of events, 
let it be known that we enter the conflict under 
moral compulsion, for high human ends and with 
clean hands and pure hearts. 

We enter this war to avert the humihation of 
the nation. We cannot accept national existence 
under such terms as Germany chooses to impose 
upon us. We cannot allow ourselves to be swept 
from the seas by her command. We cannot 
surrender the rights of peaceful commerce as 
sanctioned by international law; we must not 
submit to the dictation of the pirate; we shall 
refuse to acquiesce when our flag is dishonored, 
our ships sunk without warning, and our citi- 
zens murdered. The nation that should acquiesce 
in such indignities would thereby confess its 
impotence or its insensibility to its own honor. 



82 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

This nation is neither impotent nor without a 
high sense of honor; its rights therefore upon the 
high seas it must defend and secure. Because 
that means war, war has come. 

We enter this conflict, I must again repeat, 
not to make war upon the German people; our 
enemy is the German Government. We be- 
Heve the German Government to be the deadly 
enemy of the German people. We believe that 
the best thing that could happen to the people 
of Germany would be the defeat and overthrow 
of their government. The program of that 
government is one of conquest; the method 
adopted is the method of war; and the war is 
waged with a ruthless inhumanity without a 
parallel in the records of modern history. The 
German Government is not to be believed be- 
cause it is simply lying when it declares that 
Germany is waging a war purely in defence of 
the fatherland. The fatherland was in no danger 
in August, 1914; Europe was quite content to 
remain as it then was. Germany wanted con- 
quest in Europe and beyond; she was dreaming 
dreams of universal dominion. She saw or 
thought she saw the arrival of the supreme mo- 
ment. It is Germany bent upon conquest, Ger- 
many the breaker of her plighted word, Germany 
the apostle of war, the ravager of Belgium, the 
ruthless destroyer of whatever stands up against 
her march of dishonor, the wanton desecrator 
of the monumental forms of learning, and 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 83 

beauty and religion, the open and savage foe 
of mankind, who has made herself our enemy 
and forced America to take up arms against 
her. 

We shall endeavor not to forget the greatness 
of the people of Germany, their strength, in- 
dustry, thoroughness, mastery; we shall try to 
keep in mind the varied and vast contribution 
which they have made to the wellbeing of man- 
kind. We shall retain our sense of friendship 
for them, our hope for the return of more than 
their former prosperity; our effort shall be to 
dehver and not to crush, to open their eyes to 
the tyranny under which they suffer; and when 
the conflict is ended, we shall rejoice if once 
more we may see them clothed and in their 
right mind. 

We go to war that we may help to end this 
war, that we may help to abohsh war from the 
circle of civilized nations. That may well be 
the grand result of this war. Its continuance 
till the resources of Europe are exhausted, till 
the resources of the world are greatly reduced, 
till the folly and the guilt of the prophet of war 
are clearly seen, till the inhumanity of war shall 
be expiated by the woe of the war-makers, till 
it shall appear clear as the sun that the nation 
or race that forgets God, that pours contempt 
upon the teaching of Jesus, that puts might 
above right, and interprets the life of humanity 
solely in terms of the unmitigated animal 



84 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

struggle for existence, is the black prophet of 
national and racial suicide. The Righteous 
Ruler of the world would seem to be disposed 
to let all the nations concerned know what 
war means, that he may be able to recall men 
and nations from the error of their ways, that 
he may enlighten their eyes before they sleep 
the sleep of death. Some such revulsion from 
the interpretation of human life downward, 
to which thinkers have been prone for many 
decades, to the old interpretation of man's soul 
and the society of men upward, I anticipate as 
the grand issue of this tragedy. Our affinities 
with the jungle have been made to yield the 
guiding principle of society; our affinities with 
the Eternal Moral Deity have been regarded 
as nothing but pious dreams. The creed of 
the jungle has had .free course, in the hands of 
its chief national apostle; it stands discredited 
because it means racial annihilation. The 
Lord's Prayer may once more chant itself in 
the hearts and homes of the world as the ulti- 
mate interpretation of the universe; and the 
only creed on which man as man can live. We 
enter this terrible war to help to end it, and 
thereby to help to banish war from the earth. 

The highest civilization has again and again 
been compelled to take refuge in the shadow of 
the sword. The picture is familiar to all New 
England people, of the Pilgrims on the way to 
their meeting-house for the worship of God, the 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 85 

men with their loaded muskets on their shoulders 
forming a mihtary escort for their famihes. In 
an ideal world a scene like this would be shock- 
ing. This is, however, not an ideal world, and 
the Pilgrims knew it. They felt that they were 
the prophets of a new and higher social order, 
and they knew that the bloodthirsty savage 
was lying in wait to destroy. If the Pilgrim had 
been a pacifist, that is a foe to war under all 
conditions and circumstances, he would have 
left as record only the cowardly surrender of 
women and children to the tender mercies of 
the destroyer, only the cruel abandonment of 
the highest possessions and hopes of this conti- 
nent to the dominion of the savage. 

That picture of the women and children on 
the way to the house of God, surrounded by 
their husbands and fathers with their muskets 
ready for action, is a parable for our country 
today that no serious citizen should shght or 
misread. Here are the women and the children, 
in this land and in other lands, open to the attack 
of the modern savage; and here are the chival- 
rous men of today, worthy descendants, fit 
successors of the Pilgrims, surrounding them, 
and those whom they represent, with the de- 
fensive power of the nation. Today as then till 
the present calamity shall be overpast the wor- 
ship of God must be in the shadow of the sword; 
today as then the beauty and hope of humanity 
are under menace; today as then the appeal is 



86 THE APPEAL OF THE NATION 

for the defence of all that makes life sacred and 
great. 

What of the cost in our young life? If we 
could avert the loss with honor, avert it we 
should. If we cannot avert the loss with honor, 
the refusal to meet the cost would be treason 
to the best. Death is finally inevitable. '* To 
every man upon this earth death cometh soon 
or late." Death will take care of itself; it is 
better not to think about that. But if we are 
compelled to think about it, we must say that 
while there are many ways of dying there is 
only one way of dying well. Tens of thousands 
die in shame; tens of thousands more never did 
a significant deed in their whole life. Their 
death means little to anyone. The men who 
die well are the men who think seldom and little 
of death; they are the men who live in the 
vision of great causes, in the love of great causes, 
in devout devotion to great causes. Their death 
brings to light the glory of their life, calls, as with 
the voice of the trumpet, the minds of others 
to their causes, marshals a new host of servants 
and defenders of that for which they lived and 
died. The blood of the martyrs is the seed of 
the church; the good cause for which men live 
and die will ever return upon the living with a 
mightier appeal because of the sacrifices already 
made for it. When our country calls for de- 
fenders who shall at the same time be defenders 
of humanity, the call must come with the accents 



THE NATION AND HUMANITY 87 

of love and sacrifice in it of a multitude that no 
man can number. The vision of the majestic 
land that makes the appeal is of a land covered 
with the glory of all who have lived and died 
for her. 

" The meanest rill, the mightiest river, 
Rolls mingling with their fame forever." 

Good Friday is sacred to the memory of him 
who died supremely well. Another such scene 
is not to be found in the records of our race. 
The glory of the death of Jesus flows from his 
vision of the Kingdom of God, his steadfast 
interpretation of man's life in terms of eternity, 
his ceaseless claim that man is everywhere need- 
ful to man, his unbroken witness to the sov- 
ereignty of the spirit, his endless protest against 
the dominion of the brute. The death of Jesus 
was an incident in his transcendent and victori- 
ous life; yet as such it has become for the whole 
higher life of man the divinely availing death. 
Daughters of Jerusalem weep not for me; weep 
for yourselves! His life was lived in God; it 
was lived for the Kingdom of God in time; his 
death has become an endless memory of supreme 
insight and love, a memory that subdues, 
purifies and hallows the world. 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper procesj 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 

111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 1 6066 
r724»77q-P111 



V 




K 



